Performance Analysis
Estimating Subagging by cross-validation
In this article, we derive concentration inequalities for the cross-validation estimate of the generalization error for subagged estimators, both for classification and regressor. General loss functions and class of predictors with both finite and infinite VC-dimension are considered. We slightly generalize the formalism introduced by \cite{DUD03} to cover a large variety of cross-validation procedures including leave-one-out cross-validation, $k$-fold cross-validation, hold-out cross-validation (or split sample), and the leave-$\upsilon$-out cross-validation. \bigskip \noindent An interesting consequence is that the probability upper bound is bounded by the minimum of a Hoeffding-type bound and a Vapnik-type bounds, and thus is smaller than 1 even for small learning set. Finally, we give a simple rule on how to subbag the predictor. \bigskip
Concentration inequalities of the cross-validation estimate for stable predictors
In this article, we derive concentration inequalities for the cross-validation estimate of the generalization error for stable predictors in the context of risk assessment. The notion of stability has been first introduced by \cite{DEWA79} and extended by \cite{KEA95}, \cite{BE01} and \cite{KUNIY02} to characterize class of predictors with infinite VC dimension. In particular, this covers $k$-nearest neighbors rules, bayesian algorithm (\cite{KEA95}), boosting,... General loss functions and class of predictors are considered. We use the formalism introduced by \cite{DUD03} to cover a large variety of cross-validation procedures including leave-one-out cross-validation, $k$-fold cross-validation, hold-out cross-validation (or split sample), and the leave-$\upsilon$-out cross-validation. In particular, we give a simple rule on how to choose the cross-validation, depending on the stability of the class of predictors. In the special case of uniform stability, an interesting consequence is that the number of elements in the test set is not required to grow to infinity for the consistency of the cross-validation procedure. In this special case, the particular interest of leave-one-out cross-validation is emphasized.
The Concept Game: Better Commonsense Knowledge Extraction by Combining Text Mining and a Game with a Purpose
Herdagdelen, Amac (University of Trento) | Baroni, Marco (University of Trento)
Common sense collection has long been an important subfield of AI. This paper introduces a combined architecture for commonsense harvesting by text mining and a game with a purpose. The text miner module uses a seed set of known facts (sampled from ConceptNet) as training data and produces candidate commonsense facts mined from corpora. The game module taps humans' knowledge about the world by letting them play a simple slot-machine-like game. The proposed system allows us to collect significantly better commonsense facts than the state-of-the-art text miner alone, as shown experimentally for 5 rather different types of commonsense relations.
Significance of Classification Techniques in Prediction of Learning Disabilities
Balakrishnan, Julie M. David And Kannan
The aim of this study is to show the importance of two classification techniques, viz. decision tree and clustering, in prediction of learning disabilities (LD) of school-age children. LDs affect about 10 percent of all children enrolled in schools. The problems of children with specific learning disabilities have been a cause of concern to parents and teachers for some time. Decision trees and clustering are powerful and popular tools used for classification and prediction in Data mining. Different rules extracted from the decision tree are used for prediction of learning disabilities. Clustering is the assignment of a set of observations into subsets, called clusters, which are useful in finding the different signs and symptoms (attributes) present in the LD affected child. In this paper, J48 algorithm is used for constructing the decision tree and K-means algorithm is used for creating the clusters. By applying these classification techniques, LD in any child can be identified.
Concentration inequalities of the cross-validation estimator for Empirical Risk Minimiser
In this article, we derive concentration inequalities for the cross-validation estimate of the generalization error for empirical risk minimizers. In the general setting, we prove sanity-check bounds in the spirit of \cite{KR99} \textquotedblleft\textit{bounds showing that the worst-case error of this estimate is not much worse that of training error estimate} \textquotedblright . General loss functions and class of predictors with finite VC-dimension are considered. We closely follow the formalism introduced by \cite{DUD03} to cover a large variety of cross-validation procedures including leave-one-out cross-validation, $k$% -fold cross-validation, hold-out cross-validation (or split sample), and the leave-$\upsilon$-out cross-validation. In particular, we focus on proving the consistency of the various cross-validation procedures. We point out the interest of each cross-validation procedure in terms of rate of convergence. An estimation curve with transition phases depending on the cross-validation procedure and not only on the percentage of observations in the test sample gives a simple rule on how to choose the cross-validation. An interesting consequence is that the size of the test sample is not required to grow to infinity for the consistency of the cross-validation procedure.
Non-Sparse Regularization for Multiple Kernel Learning
Kloft, Marius, Brefeld, Ulf, Sonnenburg, Soeren, Zien, Alexander
Learning linear combinations of multiple kernels is an appealing strategy when the right choice of features is unknown. Previous approaches to multiple kernel learning (MKL) promote sparse kernel combinations to support interpretability and scalability. Unfortunately, this 1-norm MKL is rarely observed to outperform trivial baselines in practical applications. To allow for robust kernel mixtures, we generalize MKL to arbitrary norms. We devise new insights on the connection between several existing MKL formulations and develop two efficient interleaved optimization strategies for arbitrary norms, like p-norms with p>1. Empirically, we demonstrate that the interleaved optimization strategies are much faster compared to the commonly used wrapper approaches. A theoretical analysis and an experiment on controlled artificial data experiment sheds light on the appropriateness of sparse, non-sparse and $\ell_\infty$-norm MKL in various scenarios. Empirical applications of p-norm MKL to three real-world problems from computational biology show that non-sparse MKL achieves accuracies that go beyond the state-of-the-art.
On the Foundations of Adversarial Single-Class Classification
El-Yaniv, Ran, Nisenson, Mordechai
Motivated by authentication, intrusion and spam detection applications we consider single-class classification (SCC) as a two-person game between the learner and an adversary. In this game the learner has a sample from a target distribution and the goal is to construct a classifier capable of distinguishing observations from the target distribution from observations emitted from an unknown other distribution. The ideal SCC classifier must guarantee a given tolerance for the false-positive error (false alarm rate) while minimizing the false negative error (intruder pass rate). Viewing SCC as a two-person zero-sum game we identify both deterministic and randomized optimal classification strategies for different game variants. We demonstrate that randomized classification can provide a significant advantage. In the deterministic setting we show how to reduce SCC to two-class classification where in the two-class problem the other class is a synthetically generated distribution. We provide an efficient and practical algorithm for constructing and solving the two class problem. The algorithm distinguishes low density regions of the target distribution and is shown to be consistent.
Hierarchical Multiclass Decompositions with Application to Authorship Determination
El-Yaniv, Ran, Etzion-Rosenberg, Noam
This paper is mainly concerned with the question of how to decompose multiclass classification problems into binary subproblems. We extend known Jensen-Shannon bounds on the Bayes risk of binary problems to hierarchical multiclass problems and use these bounds to develop a heuristic procedure for constructing hierarchical multiclass decomposition for multinomials. We test our method and compare it to the well known "all-pairs" decomposition. Our tests are performed using a new authorship determination benchmark test of machine learning authors. The new method consistently outperforms the all-pairs decomposition when the number of classes is small and breaks even on larger multiclass problems. Using both methods, the classification accuracy we achieve, using an SVM over a feature set consisting of both high frequency single tokens and high frequency token-pairs, appears to be exceptionally high compared to known results in authorship determination.
Harnessing Cyc to Answer Clinical Researchers' Ad Hoc Queries
Lenat, Douglas (Cycorp) | Witbrock, Michael (Cycorp) | Baxter, David (Cycorp) | Blackstone, Eugene (Cleveland Clinic Foundation) | Deaton, Chris (Cycorp) | Schneider, Dave (Cycorp) | Scott, Jerry (Research Intelligence) | Shepard, Blake (Cycorp)
By extending Cyc’s ontology and KB approximately 2%, Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) have built a system to answer clinical researchers’ ad hoc queries. The query may be long and complex, hence only partially understood at first, parsed into a set of CycL (higher-order logic) fragments with open variables. But, surprisingly often, after applying various constraints (medical domain knowledge, common sense, discourse pragmatics, syntax), there is only one single way to fit those fragments together, one semantically meaningful formal query P. The system, SRA (for Semantic Research Assistant), dispatches a series of database calls and then combines, logically and arithmetically, their results into answers to P. Seeing the first few answers stream back, the user may realize that they need to abort, modify, and re-ask their query. Even before they push ASK, just knowing approximately how many answers would be returned can spark such editing. Besides real-time ad hoc query-answering, queries can be bundled and persist over time. One bundle of 275 queries is rerun quarterly by CCF to produce the procedures and outcomes data it needs to report to STS (Society of Thoracic Surgeons, an external hospital accreditation and ranking body); another bundle covers ACC (American College of Cardiology) reporting. Until full articulation/answering of precise, analytical queries becomes as straight-forward and ubiquitous as text search, even partial understanding of a query empowers semantic search over semi-structured data (ontology-tagged text), avoiding many of the false positives and false negatives that standard text searching suffers from.
Feature selection in omics prediction problems using cat scores and false nondiscovery rate control
Ahdesmäki, Miika, Strimmer, Korbinian
We revisit the problem of feature selection in linear discriminant analysis (LDA), that is, when features are correlated. First, we introduce a pooled centroids formulation of the multiclass LDA predictor function, in which the relative weights of Mahalanobis-transformed predictors are given by correlation-adjusted $t$-scores (cat scores). Second, for feature selection we propose thresholding cat scores by controlling false nondiscovery rates (FNDR). Third, training of the classifier is based on James--Stein shrinkage estimates of correlations and variances, where regularization parameters are chosen analytically without resampling. Overall, this results in an effective and computationally inexpensive framework for high-dimensional prediction with natural feature selection. The proposed shrinkage discriminant procedures are implemented in the R package ``sda'' available from the R repository CRAN.